SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Last Christmas. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
When Paul Feig's Last Christmas gets into its third act, it packs a twist for the characters played by Emilia Clarke and Henry Golding. While the two of them spend the majority of the film developing what seems like a romantic relationship, it's revealed that the latter is actually dead and appearing to the former as a vision – having donated his heart for a life-saving transplant she had the previous year (a reference to the first lyric of George Michael's song of the same name: "Last Christmas I gave you my heart").
It's the kind of cinematic surprise that's always fun to experience with a big audience... but there was a particular problem in this case. Namely, a lot of people managed to figure it all out simply by watching the trailer for the film. It ultimately had the effect of taking a little bit of energy out of the release, and apparently the director is still "frustrated" by how things were handled by the internet prior to Last Christmas hitting theaters.
These frustrations (a sentiment shared by Emilia Clarke) were recently expressed by Paul Feig during an interview with Collider, the filmmaker directly addressing the "successful" work done by sleuths who figured out what the movie was trying to do when it launched its first trailer in August 2019. Rather than taking issue with the individuals who figured out the twist, though, what really evidently upset Feig was the way in which certain outlets/websites promoted and wrote about the fan theory:
It was frustrating. I was very frustrated. I wasn’t really frustrated that people were trying to guess it. What I was very frustrated with was that the media was just picking up on that and then putting out these theories, some of which were true, but printing them like spoilers, and I just had never seen that happen to another movie before where people, even though they didn’t know if it was that they were just actively trying to spoil something, you know what I mean?
It's not exactly hard to see Paul Feig's point here. There were surely a lot of people who saw the trailer for Last Christmas in the summer and didn't start putting the pieces together, but then wound up having the pieces put together for them by journalists who did the math and wanted to show off their work.
Admittedly the twist wasn't something that was terribly hard to figure out by watching the preview footage (as Henry Golding's character was only ever shown interacting with Emilia Clarke's, and is only shown wearing one outfit), but Paul Feig just didn't love that certain reporters were seemingly trying to actively spoil his film – something he feels wouldn't have happened with other productions:
It’s not like when Knives Out came out, people were like going, ‘I bet so and so was the murder.’ So I didn’t quite understand why that was happening to a romantic comedy (laughs), so I found it very frustrating to be perfectly honest.
Ultimately, the good news for Last Christmas is that it's a movie that can be enjoyed even knowing the twist from the beginning (which is the experience for anyone watching it for a second time anyway). It may not blow your mind, or even really catch you by surprise, but it's a cute holiday-centric romantic comedy filled with engaging characters, funny bits, and plenty of heart.
Following its theatrical release last November, Last Christmas is now out on home video – available for digital download, or for purchase on Blu-ray and DVD.
